For many years I was a slave of both Microsoft and my own PC. Without Microsoft I could not compute, nor could I without my own PC. In the last 3 months I have decided to cut my bond with both, Microsoft and my own PC and so far things are working. But until today at Google Zeitgeist Europe I had not had a chance to test how well they were working. The opportunity arose because The Grove where the conference takes place is big hotel and my room is kind of far so when I left the conference center and I wanted to do some work I had a choice, go to my room and back, around 5 minutes, or stay at the conference where they have PCs and listen to Chad Hurley present Youtube. In short the choice was working on a PC that was not mine or go to my room and miss Chad. So since I am a fan of Chad (in spite of Youtube not being yet in Spanish), I decided to stay, listen to Chad and while I was doing that program one of the Lenovos that Google has for participants. So here’s the good news, that Lenovo was mine in less than 5 minutes. How? Foxmarks with all my bookmarks and username and passwords, cookies, was installed in 3 minutes. With this I could write this post for example. And then Gspace that has all my spreadsheets, docs, spreadsheets, family pictures, favorite songs, videos, was installed in 2 minutes so I had access to all my stuff. And Gmail of course was up there in an instant giving me my Fon email and the Gmail archives of my mail and google talk which is now integrated in Gmail. And that’s all I needed, in 5 minutes I had made the Lenovo mine. If I hadn’t been multitasking I could probably had done it in 3 minutes. And I remember the time when a new Windows PC would take 5 hours to configure. Chad was great btw, he showed a video of an octogenarian who is (yes) a star on Youtube.

I just met Jonathan Rosenberg, the head of Product Management at Google, and told him about the Gmailuploader, the tool we have developed at FON allowing you to send old emails to Gmail so when you open a new Gmail account it’s not empty and you can search them. He loved it. But then I was surprised and asked him why is it that Gmail does not have that functionality. I said that I would not mind giving Google the Gmailuploader as a gift, and all Google had to do in return would be to ad a little thank you note to FON for having developing it. His answer was a roll of eyes that I totally understood. If FON has so many projects to make our services better, the list of Google’s must be endless — that’s what the roll of eyes meant. And it was nice to see the human side of Jonathan. Nobody, even the person who probably has the biggest army of coders in the world at his command, can tackle everything. What I love about Google and have also seen with FON is that they are so open to collaborations.

After Jonathan, I met with many other Google people and we shared other developments like Gspace, the app that mirrors your computer on the internet using Gmail as the backoffice. And while some people have been telling me that Google was going to kill it because storing documents is not the original intention of Gmail, I found that the Google managers are totally open to new apps that make the lives of internet users around the world better (especially if some people use Gspace to empty Microsoft and send those documents to Google :). And hopefully this week we will introduce a new tool that blends Skype and Google functionalities….stayed tune!

When you think of WiFi you think at most, of stone throw coverage. Stand somewhere, throw a stone and that´s how far your wifi signal will get. Now with a new technology based on electrically guided focused WiFi beams, Intel has come up with a way for you (or us at Fon) to throw stones….100kms! And we were so excited at Fon because next week we are introducing the Fontennas and increasing the range of the Foneras 10 times. Well, c´est la vie, there´s always somebody with something longer around…